Tech Explained

In our last article, we busted the myth that your phone is secretly recording your conversations. The microphone isn’t the problem. What’s actually happening is both more mundane and more alarming — your phone is building a detailed, real-time dossier on everything you do, everywhere you go, and everyone you know. And it’s been doing it since the day you turned it on. This is the story of what your phone actually knows about you. ...

You’re talking to a friend about wanting to buy new running shoes. You never Googled it. You never typed it. And yet — the next time you open Instagram, there they are. Shoe ads. Everywhere. So the question everyone asks: is my phone secretly listening to my conversations? The short answer is: not in the way you think. But the full answer is more interesting — and a little unsettling in a different way. ...

Have you ever wondered how a computer can understand what you’re saying, find faces in pictures, or know what song is playing? The answer is a very important idea in AI: vectorization. Basically, vectorization is the process of turning things like text, pictures, and sounds into numbers. Think of it like a translator that turns the messy, real world into a simple language that computers can understand. This process is the first step for almost any AI task. ...

From the first car phones to the super-fast speeds of 5G and the exciting future of 6G, the way we communicate without wires has changed a lot. This post will take you on a journey through the history of wireless technology, showing you what was special about each new step and what’s coming next. 1G: The Beginning of Wireless The first generation of wireless technology, 1G, was all about talking. It came out in the 1980s and used analog signals, like a radio. The first cell phones were big, expensive, and the batteries didn’t last long. But for their time, they were amazing. ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a part of computer science that is all about making computers that can do things that usually require human intelligence. This includes things like learning, solving problems, understanding language, and finding patterns. There are a few different parts of AI: ...